Roham Alvandi Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: the origins of Iranian primacy in the Persian Gulf Article (Accepted version) (Refereed) Original citation: Alvandi, Roham (2012) Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: the origins of Iranian primacy in the Persian Gulf. Diplomatic history, 36 (2). pp. 337-372. ISSN 1467-7709 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7709.2011.01025.x © 2012 The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/32743/ Available in LSE Research Online: March 2012 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author’s final manuscript accepted version of the journal article, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer review process. Some differences between this version and the published version may remain. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. roham alvandi Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The Origins of Iranian Primacy in the Persian Gulf* On the morning of May 31, 1972, the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, received U.S. President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, at Tehran’s Saadabad Palace in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. That spring day, these three men were in high spirits. Nixon had arrived in Tehran the previous day from his summit meeting in Moscow with General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, where he had signed a series of arms control agree- ments with the Soviet Union. This was the era of détente, and Nixon and Kissinger were lauded as its architects. While the horrors of the Vietnam War were still unfolding, Nixon had made his momentous trip to Communist China in February, and his soaring popularity would deliver him a landslide electoral victory in November over his Democratic challenger for the presidency, Senator George McGovern. Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger had established a position of unprecedented power in the machinery of American foreign policy, conducting the administration’s secret diplomacy in Beijing, Paris, and Moscow, and sidelining the nation’s chief diplomat, Secretary of State William Rogers. The shah, too, was at the apogee of his reign. Under his leadership, Iran had enjoyed more than a decade of nearly double-digit gross domestic product (GDP) growth, commensurate with manifold increases in both oil income and military expenditure.1 Pursuing what he called his “Independent National Policy,” he had normalized Iran’s relations with the Soviet Union and now sought Iranian primacy in the Persian Gulf in the wake of Britain’s with- drawal from the region in 1971. Mohammad Reza Shah had seen five American presidents pass through the White House; each in turn had frustrated and disappointed him in his ambition to make Iran the region’s leading power. But now, under the Nixon Doctrine, the United States would rely on the shah to maintain stability in the Persian Gulf. On that May morning in Tehran, Nixon *I would like to thank Nigel Ashton, W. Taylor Fain, Louise Fawcett, Eliza Gheorghe, Jussi Hanhimäki, James Hershberg, Homa Katouzian, W. Roger Louis, Thomas Schwartz, Avi Shlaim, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1. United Nations, Statistical Yearbook 1973 (New York, 1974), 582, Table 179; Mark J. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran (Ithaca, NY. 1991), 143, Table 12; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 1973: World Armaments and Disarmament (Stockholm, 1973), 238–29, Table 7A.8. Diplomatic History, Vol. 36, No. 2 (April 2012). © 2012 The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX42DQ, UK. 337 diph_1025 337..372 338 : diplomatic history looked to the shah and uttered the words the Iranian monarch had long waited to hear: “protect me.”2 The Nixon Doctrine marked a turning point in American strategies of con- tainment in the Persian Gulf. Nixon’s predecessor, President Lyndon Johnson, had been wary of the shah’s ambition for Iranian primacy in the Gulf and instead saw regional stability as resting on a balance of power between Iran and Saudi Arabia, a policy he inherited from the British during their withdrawal from the Gulf. Contrary to popular perceptions of Nixon’s Gulf policy as one of balanc- ing Iran and Saudi Arabia as the “twin pillars” of the Gulf, between 1969 and 1972 Nixon gradually abandoned balancing and tilted in favor of Iran.3 This article is concerned with the question of why Nixon embraced Iranian primacy in the Gulf, whereas Johnson had rejected it. Declining Anglo-American power in the context of the British withdrawal from the Gulf between 1968 and 1971, and America’s quagmire in Vietnam, do not provide an adequate explanation.4 These important constraints confronted both Johnson and Nixon; yet each president adopted quite distinct Gulf policies. Here I make the case that the shift in U.S. Gulf policy from balancing under Johnson to Iranian primacy under Nixon reflected a change in American thinking about Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Because of his long-standing friendship with the shah, Richard Nixon brought new ideas to the White House about the Pahlavi monarch and his ambitions for Iran, which stood in stark contrast with the views of both the Johnson admin- istration and the British. This change in American thinking provided fertile ground for the shah’s relentless efforts to secure Washington’s backing for Iranian regional primacy under the Nixon Doctrine. By lifting virtually all restrictions on U.S. arms sales to Iran, Nixon allowed the shah to assume the regional leadership role that he had always sought for Iran. the shah and PAX BRITANNICA The idea that security in the Persian Gulf rests on a “balance of power” between Iran and Saudi Arabia finds its origins in London. For more than a century, Her Majesty’s Government ruled the Gulf as a British lake on the periphery of India, protecting significant political and economic interests along 2. Memorandum of Conversation, Tehran,May 31, 1972. U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1969–1976,E-4, Documents on Iran and Iraq, 1969–1972, Document 201. All documents from the U.S. Department of State’s FRUS series are henceforth cited in the format Title, Volume, Document Number. All are accessible at http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/. 3. The term “twin pillars” does not appear in the documentary record. Following the fall of the shah, it was commonly used by journalists as shorthand for pre-1979 U.S. policy toward the Persian Gulf, and soon gained currency with historians. 4. See W. Taylor Fain, American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region (New York, 2008), 169–200; F. Gregory Gause III, “British and American Policies in the Persian Gulf, 1968–1973,” Review of International Studies, 11, no. 4 (1985): 247–73; Tore T. Petersen, Richard Nixon, Great Britain and the Anglo-American Alignment in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula: Making Allies out of Clients (Brighton, UK, 2009), 79–97. Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah : 339 the southern shore where Arab rulers governed a series of British protected states.5 Britain’s balance of power policy in the Gulf consisted of preventing either of the two largest littoral powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, from dominating their smaller and weaker Arab neighbors, while also deterring any other great power from entering the Gulf. However, by the 1960s the decline of the British Empire had dramatically accelerated, and on January 16, 1968 the Labour Government, led by Prime Minister Harold Wilson, announced that Britain would withdraw all its military forces from the Gulf by 1971 as part of a larger withdrawal “East of Suez.” The decision was motivated by the Cabinet’s desire to cut defense spending and achieve fiscal austerity in the face of a severe economic crisis, while avoiding painful cuts in social spending. In order to avoid a power vacuum following the British withdrawal, which could result in regional instability and Soviet encroachment, a new balance of power would need to emerge to protect British interests.6 The solution developed by the mandarins of the British Foreign Office was to strengthen the British-protected states by persuading them to join together in a single Arab federation and to encourage Saudi Arabia to play a more active role in the Persian Gulf, thereby providing an Arab counterweight to the shah’s ambitions for Iranian regional primacy. In 1967, the Foreign Office had pre- pared a report on Britain’s long-term policy in the Gulf, the conclusions of which were approved by the Cabinet’s Defense and Overseas Policy Committee on June 7, 1968. According to this report Britain would “encourage an indig- enous balance of power which does not require our military presence.” This balance of power would depend above all on Saudi Arabia and Iran, as “they are also the two best placed to bring force to bear in the area, the Saudis by virtue of their commanding geographical position and the Iranians through their growing naval supremacy in the Gulf.